


The Deal

by explodingnebulae



Series: Vampire!Agatha [5]
Category: Dracula (TV 2020)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:08:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24251833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/explodingnebulae/pseuds/explodingnebulae
Summary: Something between hellfire and tantalizing warmth.Perhaps he was her punishment.Dracula and Agatha return to her home.
Relationships: Dracula & Agatha Van Helsing, Dracula/Agatha Van Helsing
Series: Vampire!Agatha [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1723690
Comments: 6
Kudos: 45





	The Deal

**Author's Note:**

> Part Five gave me more issues than I care to admit and I'm not happy with how it turned out. I am sorry that it took so long to get up. Personal life and all that jazz. Either way, ONWARDS

Hot and frantic was his mouth at her neck. Dracula was high on her blood the moment he sank into her neck, using his opiate to calm her. It still tasted human but very distinctively hers. His august Countess. She was his every thought, his every wish. _His_ wife. 

“You’ll have a mind to keep your thoughts and mouth to yourself, Count Dracula,” she snapped hotly at him, her words a snarl as she pushed his chest and shoved him away. Abhorrence had seized her the moment she had looked at the body and only increased when he tossed the corpse over the cliff.

“Agatha, I’m only trying to help. You were going into shock, which can be very dangerous for a vampire, especially a hungry one,” he dictated, voice calm and quiet as his thumb traced over the open wound, sealing it shut. The cold light of her kitchen reminded her of the hospital. 

She stared up at him, the hellfire in her eyes undeniable, only accentuated by the blood dried to her face. He had brought her back to her house, their house. There was silence between them the whole way. Agatha had been unsure of what to say or do, her inner dialogue was a jumbled mess of her thoughts, the girl’s, and his. So, so, so very loud as she struggled to keep her head above the proverbial water.

He stood before her, unmoving, unblinking, as she glared at him. A man of his word, he had used his opiate to quiet her mind, leaving only her thoughts. However, she was unsure if that was better or worse. Once his thoughts, calming and reassuring though they were, left her mind and took the human’s, her own rang clearly. 

_This is who I am. No, it isn’t. I am not a mindless beast, but I feel alive._

She knew he could hear her. He heard her repetitive shame over and over as it echoed in her skull. In his own way, carnal as it was, Dracula had been honest. He was only trying to help and she was thwarting him at every turn as though his actions were done out of malice.

“You lured me outside,” she started slowly, peeling the ruined clothes from her body. She could clean herself up downstairs, at least get a start, but she needed a shower. “You wanted me to feed.” 

“Of course I did.” He followed her as she climbed the stairs. “You’re a vampire and your blood bags aren’t enough. You’re eating scraps and calling them meals. Tell me something…”

She turned on the water, annoyed by his pestering, but she welcomed the distraction. Fighting with him was something Agatha was quite an expert at. 

“Are you hungry even now?”

The former nun shifted to face him and caught him pushing his slacks from his body. Once naked, he walked towards her, closing the gap between them. He held her chin in place with his index and thumb, making her look to him, meet his eye.

Knowing that she couldn’t look away, Agatha grabbed his wrist and walked backwards into the shower, leading him with her. If she could distract him from the question, she would. Self control had been tossed to the wayside thanks to his hunger and she had let him best her for the last time. 

The water burned her flesh wherever it touched, steam rolling out into the washroom as crimson dripped into the drain below. Dracula ran his hands through her hair as she faced him, her back to the water, and his eyes softened just a touch. He had no intentions of not getting his answer, that much was clear, but he was willing to amuse her for the time being. Always the showman.

She washed without paying him more mind than she had to, her racing mind stilling against the coursing water. The sickening smell of lifeless blood ebbed from her senses, but her guilt did not. 

Was she guilty of taking a life? Yes. 

Did she feel guilty for taking that life?

“Do you?” 

His voice behind her had been almost unexpected if the questions hadn’t been so pressing. The echo of her thought made her turn around once again, seeing him there, naked, looking at her expectantly. 

“Or didn’t you think of that? Have you placed your guilt yet? Does it lie with the taking of poor, sweet Anna’s life? Or does it burrow itself in the fact that you don’t feel guilty at all?” He was probing her, trying to get a response, and doing anything to get it. 

“Be sure to clean up after washing. I don’t want the blood of an innocent in my home.” Agatha ignored his interrogation as she stepped out of the shower, leaving him to his own devices.

She wrapped the towel around her frame and caught sight of her complexion in the mirror. What was once pallid now was drowned in color, in life. Her feet carried her to the steamed mirror and she wiped away enough to further inspect her features. 

There was life in her cheeks, more than there had been for years, her eyes no longer holding the exhaustion that had plagued her. She leaned in closer, paying no mind to Dracula still in the shower behind her, and brought an experimental finger to her upper lip. With her hunger somewhat subsided, Agatha could see her human teeth and she touched them to make sure they would remain that way.

No change. 

Her face was her own, her will her own, her actions…

Dracula was right: Agatha felt no guilt for taking the girl’s life. Only an empty imitation of it. 

She turned from the mirror, left the bathroom, walked into her bedroom, and closed the door behind her. There was an unfamiliar understanding welling within her as she searched her dressers for something to wear. A nightdress would do, and she grabbed it, slipping it over her form. Agatha stood for a moment, took a breath, and went into her study. Still, she paid the Count no mind, even as she heard him padding around in the bathroom, into the hall after her. 

“Agatha.”

It almost, _almost_ , sounded like he was begging. He’s not used to being ignored, especially not by her. She indulged him, indulged _in_ him, and she knew he would not leave well enough alone until he got a reaction from her. The door she closed fruitlessly behind her swung open as she took a seat at her desk. 

“Don’t ignore me,” he snorted as he strode into the room. The door slammed shut behind him, but Agatha had been accustomed to his behaviors, even after fifty years apart. Not twenty-four hours earlier, they had been in the throes of a passion she had never known, yet it felt like a memory.

“I am not ignoring you,” she returned, her words apathetic, despite the conflict of emotions within her. She rose from her chair and turned around to look at him. Towel wrapped around his waist, wet hair slicked back, dark eyes growing darker. Had she not wanted to stake him where he stood, she might have wanted to fuck him.

“Then why did you get out of the shower?” A step forward.

“Because you, Count Dracula, need to learn when to bite your tongue,” Agatha shot back, unmoving as he stalked closer. She definitely would have wanted to sleep with him.

He carried antagonism with every agitating step nearer to her, his features twitching impatiently as he stopped in front of her. There was enough space for her to breathe and shove him away if she wished. Agatha’s fingers wrapped around the back of her chair, careful not to dig her nails into the fabric. 

“Have I asked anything that you can’t answer? These last fifty years haven’t made you soft, Agatha. You’re decidedly holding out on me. Why?” Dracula held her gaze as he spoke only for her, voice low despite being the only ones in the house. 

She could feel something akin to rage begin to burn within her, scorching her belly as it rolled up her throat. Yet, she did not lash out. Years of self-control, long before her undeath, had proven useful around him at all times. Self-restraint, though she could not say much for bloodlust, was something Agatha drowned in, and he knew it.

“Because you already have your answer. You want to hear it for your own satisfaction and I am not going to indulge you,” she protested as she straightened her posture, sizing him despite being half a foot shorter. 

“Of course I want to hear you say it, but you’ve got the why wrong,” he smiled emptily down at her. “You need to hear yourself say that you enjoyed feeding from a human, that you feasted from the heart.”

Agatha tensed. 

“You know I’m right.”

She paused, an idea creeping into her mind as he stood before her. Another chance for another experiment. Fears were bargaining chips to them, a game that they could indulge in until time itself stopped. An ultimatum perhaps.

“Under one condition,” she postulated, returning his empty smile with a full one of her own. “Come morning, you enter the sunlight.”

Dracula’s lip curled as he took a step back, clearly repulsed by the idea. Then a moment, just a moment, of contemplation turned behind his eyes. 

“A hand,” he stated flatly, not wanting to negotiate with her. She always drove a hard bargain, but he would always take the bait. Anything to take the game one level further.

“Your arm.” She wanted to see how far Dracula would be willing to go. There was no possibility of the sun causing him any true damage, as indestructible as vampires seemed to be. Out of all the ones she had studied throughout the course of her life, he was the most resilient, the cleverest of them. That did not mean, however, that he was without faults. One of them being her. 

“What if your theory is wrong? What if I do burn in the sunlight?” He was challenging her with equal force, a dance the two of them had started over the month aboard the _Demeter_ , refined now.

“You didn’t burst into ash in the reflection of Harker’s cross,” she pointed out and took a step nearer to him, her anger dissipating as delight for the game returned to her. “If memory serves, you thrashed on the ground like a child throwing a tantrum.”

A low growl rumbled in his throat, clearly unamused by her statement. The smirk that spread across her lips was almost devilish and she did nothing to dissuade it. Yes, the circumstances were grim and yes, she was responsible for a murder on this night. But Dracula always drew something from her that she could never place. 

Something between hellfire and tantalizing warmth. 

Perhaps he was her punishment. 

“Do we have a deal?” she pressed as she ignored the way his tongue peeked between his lips as he licked them.

“Yes, we have a deal,” he uttered and stepped closer, his hands coming to her waist. There was no smile upon his face, no amusement. “Now, I’ll collect what I’m owed.”

Agatha stilled in his hold, motionless as she searched for the words. Simplicity had an allure that verbosity could not possess. He wanted what was wrongfully his, even if it was gained through rightful means. 

“I have taken a life, Count Dracula,” she began as he brought his face closer to her. It was almost as though he wanted to steal the words from her mouth, taste them instead of hear them. “It is not my first and will not be my last.”

“And?”

She swallowed and closed her eyes, seeing the woman’s mutilated corpse in the darkness, the look of terror affixed in her dead eyes. The last emotion of a life hopefully did not follow the dead in whatever came next. Agatha opened her eyes but did not make any other attempt to move, lest her composition shatter. Strong and immortal though she might have been, the former nun was not without emotion. 

“And I enjoyed it.”

His grip tightened around her waist as he drew her closer. Despite his lips on hers and she kissing him back, clarity was hers. At last an admission of truth she had never wanted to know. She enjoyed draining that poor girl, she reveled in the taste of fresh blood, and she wanted to do it again.

“Of course you did,” he whispered before drawing his head back, breaking from the kiss. “You’re a vampire.”

“I know that.” Her voice was low as she looked down and noticed how the white sheet around his waist was lifted slightly. A beast under any circumstances, even in one such as this. Especially one such as this, her brain corrected. “I have been for half a century.”

“But you don’t know how to be one, do you?” Dracula’s grip dropped from her waist and he took a step back, as though to observe her in her entirety. “I can teach you.”

“If I wanted to be a glutton, I could do it easily. Self-restraint is n--”

“A waste of time, my dear. And will always cause more destruction in the end. You know that, Agatha. I’d hate to see you lose yourself to hunger because you refuse your nature.” He paused for a moment, ruminating on a lost memory. “I’ve seen it happen before.”

“To one of your brides?” Her inquiry wasn’t meant to be tender and it didn’t sound as such. He still led her to feed, he still kept her mind unoccupied until they were near the scene, he still threw temptation in her face. He was still the catalyst to her crime.

“No,” he returned, not saying anything further on the subject.

Instead, he turned and walked out of the room, leaving her to her own devices once more. Agatha shut the door after he did not immediately come back and returned to her desk. What he was doing, she did not know, nor did she care to. If anything, he had a free pass to cause as much destruction as he wanted tonight. It would be hypocritical of her to say otherwise, to stop him, even if every part of her screamed to go after him.

She needed to document the events of the day, every grizzly detail of the death, every emotion and every second. Fifty years later and she still held her research dear to her, but it turned out that she was not her favorite test subject. Emotions were tricky to articulate when they were her own, the truth hard to solidify on paper when it came to the more animal side of her. Agatha reached for her leatherbound notebook and a pen, turned to the next blank page, and began to write.

\-----

He could see her clearly in his mind as he dressed. His divine Countess in all of her glory. The sight of her covered in blood, giving in, surrendering to what she so desperately needed... How beautiful she had been and how readily he had been to grant reverence. Yet, she had thwarted him, stonewalled him, as she fell back from the body. He knew she ate from blood bags, donations, as she called them, and he tasted it on her. Just as he knew her misplaced guilt when she fed. She wasn’t guilty at all.

She was ashamed. 

A state he apparently knew well, though he swallowed that conversation for when he wasn’t half-starved. Fifty years of restraint was nothing for him, not when he had lived for nearly five centuries. Not to mention, he had fed, gorged himself, on his hand-picked dinners the whole way to England. He hadn’t brought Agatha along to feed on, though he did indulge in her after each meal to rid himself of each passenger’s inferior aftertaste. No, in earnest, he had not been interested in simply killing her. 

Such a woman deserved eternity absolute. In all of his years no human had been so damnably obstinate, and he could not bring himself to part from her. A superior vintage in every aspect from intelligence to indulgences, she offered him more than entertainment; she offered him equal opposition.

She had fought him from the moment she awoke aboard the ship. He knew then that her words to Harker had been only that. In the face of sin incarnate, his impertinent nun had been braver than David when fighting Goliath. Her persistence came not from a place of misplaced confidence, but of personal conviction.

And it was apparent to him that she still possessed many of her morals, even in her afterlife. She had been freed of mortal ties, yet still lived as a mortal. Had he not known the very fabric of her being, he would say that it was a waste of time. Her inability to rid herself of that which made her human made her blood all the sweeter to him.

He returned the towel to the washroom, decidedly not looking in the mirror as he exited the room, and glanced down the hall in the direction of her personal study. Many of the books lining the walls had belonged to his personal library and he knew she had read them over and over to gain insight on his existence. Always going over every detail with a fine-toothed comb, the part of her he did not get to see during their time together.

Dracula took a step closer, head tilted to better hear the pace of her pen against paper, and wondered if she would be willing to indulge him in what she was writing. Certainly not at present as her distress was nearly palpable, would have been if he were to taste her blood again. Perhaps he could at least try to calm her. 

He finished crossing the hall and wrapped his hand on the knob of the door. 

**Author's Note:**

> A SUPER short addition, for sure. But I promise part 6 will be both longer, dirtier, and much, much more emotional. 'Til then my dears.


End file.
